(from another calendar)
snow
More Things Fall Out of the Sky and Disturb My Hair
and the snow (crystalline) makes it shine
and the rain makes it smell more like hair
and the wind proves that everything we do can be undone
and the sun burns light into it (the operative word being
burns)
and the leaves that have died
and been reborn as memento mori entangle themselves in it
and crumble into dust as I take out my comb
— teeth and all —
and stare at it, wondering how
the clouds get so close to earth that they’re fog
and my hair and I walk sideways
into it
I’d offer you everything but the barometer’s falling
realistic dialogue
“So I get this word-a-day thing emailed to me every day by the Oxford English Dictionary and…”
“I hate the way the Oxford English Dictionary controls all the words. It’s elitist. They’re profiteering off the English language. Somebody has to challenge their power.”
“We could storm the ramparts of their headquarters and ride triumphantly away with a new vocabulary.”
“It’s not that easy. They control the meanings of the words ‘ramparts’ and ‘storm,’ so our options are limited.”
snowed in
the war is just
an anagram
with thanks to Brad for half of the dialogue and most of the humor
long…
.
long winter night
the crackling
of text messages
.
lingering cold
my breath clouds
the phone screen
.
melting snow
I change my ring tone
to something faster
.
These days this blog is basically my playground. I think I used to have much more of a sense of trying to impress people or please them when I wrote here. Or maybe I didn’t? I don’t really remember anymore. But I know that lately this idea of the blog as my playground has been very strong in my mind. For a while it felt like a burden, like a chore I had to do. Maybe it just got to be that way after a while. Now it’s like, oh, I get to write some stuff! I get to write whatever I want! Whatever crazy thing comes into my head! And it really doesn’t matter if anyone likes it! Because blogs are free and no one has to read anything they don’t want to and even if no one reads it at all, I’m having a great time!
No, I’m not trying to say these haiku are especially crazy. They’re pretty conventional. They’re a little dull, to me. They’re what I felt like writing tonight.
I think tomorrow I’ll feel like writing something completely different.
Addendum, 4/5/14: Okay, I just discovered this. I really have to read my blog more often. Apparently I don’t have an original thought in my head.
.
.
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Very short haibun
In the bare branches of the lilac, clusters of oak leaves are lodged like lost mittens.
a snowy morning arranging for its own meaning
—–
In other news:
A ton of people have sent me polar vortex poems so far, which is great because it’s still so cold here that poetry is basically the only thing keeping me sane. You can send me any you’ve got till tomorrow morning. I’ll post them over the weekend.
bark, howl, whisper
.
.
(second snow)
.
second snow
an angry wound
next to the scar
.
first snow
.
winter darkness
a load-bearing wall
collapses
.
deep winter
they compare the size
of their rifles
.
(winter darkness, Modern Haiku 43.3; deep winter, A Hundred Gourds 1.4)
.
NaHaiWriMo: excerpts
snow falls on the cold frame distant stars
(Feb. 6: frame)
.
lake ice growing thinner
I count my money
again
(Feb. 9: ice)
.
___________________________________________________________________________
I don’t have time to do NaHaiWriMo this month, so I’m doing it. There is something about that innocent little prompt that has the mysterious power to jar me out of writer’s block, even if temporarily. And once I’ve written my one haiku for the day I feel absolved of all guilt for not writing for another 24 hours, which I believe actually saves me time in the end.
Michael Dylan Welch is setting the prompts again this year (this whole thing was his idea) and they’re alphabetical this time (a is for apple, you know the drill). That’s kind of satisfying too, especially to organization freaks like me.
This is all I have right now that I can stand to show people. I’ll try to post another update later in the month.
(standing)
.
standing at one point
of a triangle
evening snow
.
Presence #45
.
(I wrote this last August at Haiku North America during Eve Luckring’s amazing workshop on “Video Renku: Link and Shift in Visual Language.” I was responding to a visual prompt of a photograph that depicted, as far as I can remember, three bath products lined up on a shelf in a chilly-looking tiled bathroom. [It’s not as prosaic as it sounds. It was art.] We were supposed to be responding not to the content — the subject — of the photo but to its structure, visual elements like patterns and colors and numbers of objects. We were supposed to be “linking” our poem to the photograph in the sometimes ineffable way that two verses in a renku are linked.
I really, really have to do that exercise again. I’ve been saying that for six months now. Nag me until I actually do it.)
.
calendar time
.
first snow
the footprints of the neighbors
we’ve never seen
.
So there’s a calendar that has haiku on it. Maybe there’s more than one. The one I know about is published by Snapshot Press and you can find out about it here. It looks really cool but I haven’t actually seen it yet. I plan to order one or two soon though because it contains this haiku of mine. I’ve posted it here before but what the heck. The first snow will probably be showing up sometime soon around here, so it’s timely. Also, I wanted to let you know about the whole calendar thing well in advance of Christmas so you can order some for all the people you normally give fruitcake to. In the interests of world peace and all that.
Incidentally, I based this very loosely on this haiku by Basho:
秋深き 隣は何を する人ぞ
aki fukaki tonari wa nani wo suru hito zo
Deep autumn—
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?
— Basho, tr. R.H. Blyth
(And how I have managed to go so long without finding the Classical Japanese Database from which the transcription and translation above are taken, I have absolutely no idea. Kudos to Carl Johnson for putting this amazing resource together.)
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Protected: Climbing
(ninth snow)
Notes from the Gean 3:1, June 2011
If you follow the link above to the page where this haiga appears in Notes from the Gean, it will say that the tanka is by me and the photo is by Aubrie Cox, but this is not really accurate. The credits at the bottom right of the tanka here are accurate and much more interesting.
Back in January after I’d been obsessively writing haiku about snow for a month or two and had lost all perspective on whether any of it was any good, I sent a bunch of snow haiku to Aubrie for her editing expertise (which is considerable). She gave me some good feedback on a lot of the haiku, several of which have been published now. Then she commented that the haiku that began “ninth snow” might work as a tanka…and added the two lines above to it. And then she went and took a great picture and made a haiga out of it.
Yeah. I know. It’s a lot better now.
And it’s getting to be really hot around here now…so it’s nice to have snow poetry back around to cool me off.
Drifting Clouds (Yotsumono)
(snowmelt)
snowmelt
and the black earth beneath:
I abandon
the idea of dying
on purpose
.
Notes from the Gean 3:1, June 2011
(second snow)
(spring snow)
April 28: Post Office
The main post office on Gorky Street in Moscow. A line of squat beige phones — a line of people in thick coats to their ankles standing beside them. Staring at them like half-boiled pots, waiting for them to ring. Waiting to hear the voice of someone from the other side of the Iron Curtain.
You’ve filled in the required forms. When do you want to talk? Whom do you want to talk to? For how long would you like this conversation to continue? Be careful: they’ll give you exactly the amount of time you ask for, no more and no less. But the phones are ringing, your mind is buzzing, you can only make awkward, half-thought-through calculations.
Not long after our phones ring and we lift the receivers to our ears like stones, we realize we answered all the questions wrong. The conversations should have been earlier or later, longer or shorter. The people we are talking to are not people we really know. We’ve forgotten the languages they’re speaking. We live in different countries for what we now know is forever, though we meant it to be temporary. “Wait —” we say. “It’s about to end —”
The phone makes a noise that means my life has returned to me. Everything goes silent until it’s the next person’s turn. Down the line, feet shuffle, stirring the hems of coats.
.
melting snow —
letting go
of what I meant to say
___________________________________________________________________________
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(Chrysanthemum 9, April 2011)
April 6 (Anniversary)
anniversary
we argue about which way
the snow is falling
.
First published in The Mainichi Daily News, Feb. 22, 2011
.
(Special thanks to Aubrie Cox for letting me know this poem had appeared in print — after six weeks I still hadn’t noticed. Now go look at Aubrie’s doodle haiga.)
___________________________
.
Husband: But our anniversary is in August. And why would we argue about anything so stupid?
Me: No, no, dear, I meant the other guy I’ve been married to for twenty years.
Husband: Oh.
…
April 2: Honey (Flashbacks to Moscow, 1990)
February
you bake me a sweet cake
in a sugarless country
.
skiing in Gorky Park—
suddenly realizing
where we’re going
.
March
a snowstorm
settles it
.
April
babushkas chiding us
for our warmth
.
May
blossoming
at last
.
_________________________________
Happy birthday, honey.
Red Dragonfly 